Atlas · Stevey's Tech Talk
Stevey's Tech Talk
Stevey's Tech Talk was a video series I recorded during the Covid years (2020–2022). Fifty-five episodes — mostly me talking to a camera about programming, big-tech culture, languages, and whatever else was on my mind, plus a handful of guest interviews and a couple of Emacs screencasts. It was a learning period for me, and most of the STT content was meh. But there were a few good nuggets buried in there, so I've transcribed and edited the best ones.
How I chose
Candidly, I did not go back and listen to them all yet. I had AI agents read every episode, looking for the ones that covered stuff not in my essays, and then we took the subset that flowed well and told cool stories. And after some heavy cutting, they wound up being pretty good reads.
The episodes that survived the cutting floor are mostly back-stories for the essays: How I bombed my own Google interview. How the Platforms Rant leaked. What three years running engineering at Grab in Southeast Asia were actually like. I also kept my interview with Jeff Atwood, where we talk about the Stack Overflow origin story and his new work on Discourse.
The Guided Tour of Emacs, episode 39, was my most-watched episode of all time. People commented on being surprised at how "fluent" I was. It is fun to watch, especially towards the end, where I'll perform very complex Emacs operations in real time, super fast, on the first try, while narrating everything I'm doing. It's clear I've lived in Emacs for decades, and it's fun to watch me use it. And because I narrate every move, it turns out to read just fine, too — the transcript's below if you'd rather follow along in text. And if you're wondering why my head in the video is the size of a regulation basketball, read about the Elephant in the Room.
As for the rest of the series, I may eventually turn up other episodes that are worth transcribing. But I tended to meander so much that they would likely need heavy editing. I think this set we chose is a good representation of my work on the show.
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E12
How writing a computer game got me jobs at Amazon and Google
How writing a video game (Wyvern) got me hired at both Amazon and Google — including the part I'm not proud of, about a brilliant self-taught programmer I drove away.
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E27
My Embarrassing Google Interview
The full story of how I bombed my own Google interview and got hired anyway. A complete arc, and one I tell better out loud than I ever have in print — the cleanest of the bunch, and the pilot for the edited version.
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E28
The story behind my Platforms Rant
How the Platforms Rant actually got out: drunk, wrong browser tab, no undo, and a phone call from Sweden forty minutes later. The backstory the rant itself never tells.
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E29
My Grab Adventure, Part 1
Three years running engineering in Southeast Asia — the unbanked cash economy, motorbike loans, warehouses full of fake rides. None of this is in any essay; it only exists here.
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E39
Screencast · video A guided tour of Emacs
A screen-share tour of my Emacs setup, and my most-watched episode ever. Watch it for the keystrokes flying in real time, or read the transcript — narrated the whole way through, it turns out to read just fine on its own.
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E50
Guest interview Jeff Atwood (Stack Overflow cofounder)
A long conversation with Jeff Atwood — who cofounded Stack Overflow and Discourse — on the origin of Stack Overflow, owning your own community software, and a standing bet with John Carmack about self-driving cars.